


You are Boundless in Beauty With Fright in Your Face

by river_soul



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-07
Updated: 2012-04-07
Packaged: 2017-11-03 05:35:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/377874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_soul/pseuds/river_soul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She stares at the left side of his face, half melted from the cruelness of his brother, and tries to remember once when he’d frightened her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You are Boundless in Beauty With Fright in Your Face

The dawn sky is blood red with warning the day of her father’s trial.

\--

Sansa wakes in the softness of her own bed with a scream still caught in her throat and the memory of her father’s last moment seared inside her. The splendor of Kings Landing has gone out of her and there is only the haze of grief and despair inside her now. All that remains to her is Joffrey’s men and their cruel hands on her to bring the world back into sharp, bright focus.

She cries out, face hot with tears and blood as Joffrey watches, the joy and exhilaration on his face unmistakable. “Sansa,” he says with a frown, wearing his mothers mask of false disappointment, “I had hoped we were passed such things.”

“My apologies your grace,” she says and her voice sounds small, foreign to her own ears. She bows her head in submission, in defeat and doesn’t lift her head until their steps fade and she feels the slight pressure of gloved fingers on the underside of her chin.

“Child,” the Hound says but there is no understanding, no relief in his voice.

He is her one constant now, always there in the wake of Joffrey. His hands are gentle upon her shoulder and sure against her pale skin. His fingers linger on her lips too long these days and she breathes out unsteadily. She stares at the left side of his face, half melted from the cruelness of his brother, and tries to remember once when he’d frightened her.

\--

There is no funeral for Eddard Stark and no black dress for Sansa to wear. They do not speak his name and she dares not speak it for them.

There is no one to mourn him here but her and even this she must do in secret.

\--

Sansa is, by some small mercy she knows is not Joffry’s doing, allowed to watch them burn his body the next morning. It is an old custom of the North for when the ground was too frozen to dig and the direwolves once swelled in the forests but the Lannisters do not know this. It is a small victory but a hollow one. Her father does not deserve this and Sansa thinks of Winterfell and the dark tombs under the castle where the Stark’s have rested for generations.

Her father, Sansa realizes, will never go North again and Sansa fears neither will she.

Not after this.

She does not ask where they will take his ashes. She knows they will not give them to her, just as she knows her heart cannot take the truth of where he will go after this.

The fire is hot against her face and as it leaps from the wood to her father’s headless body Sansa aches to climb atop the pyre and join him. She imagines the heat of the fire, her skin black and brittle, flames the color of her hair. She does not realize she has stepped forward, intent clear on her face until the Hound reaches for her, soundlessly.

His eyes are dark, endless and unfathomable to her but his hand is tight around her shoulder, an anchor to life that she longs to throw off.

\--

In the darkness of her chamber Sansa cries for her father, sobs that tear at her lungs and burn her throat. She cannot stop them once the door closes and she is left to the silence and isolation of her chambers. She knows the Hound, outside her door, can hear her but he does not come.

In the morning though, when she rises and washes the grief from her face, he is there. Down, down she goes to the Iron Throne, his hand splayed against the small of her back as he pushes through the crowd. Here she smiles like she is told but her skin feels too tight, stretched over bones that feel old and worn.

She accepts Joffrey’s hand on her arm; the heavy weight of it is enough to make her stomach turn but her smile remains frozen. Here she is dutiful and obedient and no one asks about the neat red line that splits her lip or the dark sweep of purple along cheek. Instead they smile and curtsy, eyes only for Joffrey and the beauty of his mother.

Sansa does not see them; she stares only at Sir Ilyn Payne and her father’s sword on his back.

\---

There is no weirwood in the Red Keep’s Godswood, only the great oak tree, faceless and unseeing for Sansa to kneel before.

She comes in the mornings, the Hound on her heels, to pray. She asks the Old Gods for forgiveness and for the strength of her father. She prays the rumors are true, that Arya has left the city and the war her brother wages in the North is succeeding. She prays she will see her family again but she receives no answer. The Old Gods are dead south of the Neck they say and these woods, this sacred place feel as empty and hollowed out as she does.

Still she comes, hair loose around her face in the way of the North, neck and face bare of Joffrey’s gifts and offers herself up to the one remnant of the North that remains to her.

\---

The dawn is blood red with warning the day Margaery Tyrell arrives in Kings Landing.

**Author's Note:**

> New [tumblr](http://river-soul.tumblr.com/) friends are always welcome!


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